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Group Mentoring

What is group mentoring? The notion of placing adolescents in groups with one or more caring adults is not new. Youth have long participated in skills-training groups, camps, team sports, outdoor adventure programs, scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, 4-H, and a myriad of other activities in which one or more adults meet with the youth in small, time-limited groups on a regular basis. It may be the case that some of the youth groups of yesterday are being "repackaged" as the group mentoring programs of today.

A variety of factors make the task of understanding just what group mentoring is - and how it is different from previous group activities - is even more complicated. Group mentoring programs show considerable variation in size, the number of adults and youth who comprise the group, the amount of time that the group spends together, the fluidity of the membership, the structure imposed and the activities in which they engage.

Despite these definitional issues, it is important to begin to take stock in the current group mentoring programs. Along just these lines, Herrera and colleagues at Public/Private Ventures, in collaboration with MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, recently completed a study of mentoring groups. Entitled, Group Mentoring, A Study of Mentoring Groups in Three Programs," it draws on data collected in earlier P/PV studies of mentors² and program staff.³ In addition, it includes interviews with youth and mentors in three different group programs.

Their findings offer an interesting, and somewhat complicated, picture of the potential benefits and limitations of group mentoring.

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